Two interestingreviews of the new Chrome OS and new hardware. The general gist? While we're all busy focussing on Android, Chrome OS keeps getting better and better - even though it's not there quite yet. Nuance is in the final verdict - The Verge claims it's almost there: "Google is closer than ever to convincing the world that we can live online, that we can do away with the old hard drives and local apps and spend our lives on the web." ReadWriteWeb is already convinced: "The point is, Chrome OS is ready for the market." I have to admit that, for the first time, I feel somewhat compelled by Chrome OS.

Form my understanding, its a web browser operating system. If the cloud is doing the storing, management, and manipulation of my work, I would think the os wouldn't need that much power. If it does, then I'm out on the whole Chrome OS concept.

If the cloud is doing the storing, management, and manipulation of my work,

If it is done this way then you're correct, it could work, but I find that modern webbrowser can be very resource intensive.

IMHO Google agree: they put 4GB of RAM in the Chromebook, so, I doubt that a Raspberry Pi with 256MB would be very useful: I know a website which use 300MB of RAM(!) (probably a bug in the website as it's just a blog).

I think I need to write a plugin for all of the browsers I use to block 300 mb websites. I remember being ticked off that I wrote code that generated a 1 mb file. Its painful moving from embedded work to web :/

I'm not sure that's fair... not inefficient, just forced to do things in a particular way (from the way WWW developed over the past 2 decades) - within those constraints, efficiency does matter (witness improvement in js over the past few years)

I know a website which use 300MB of RAM(!) (probably a bug in the website as it's just a blog).

I'd guess one of horrible blog comments systems (like Disqus) is the probable perpetrator... or maybe erring usage of translucency & heavy image backgrounds, this also tends to have heavy resource impact, it seems.

Form my understanding, its a web browser operating system. If the cloud is doing the storing, management, and manipulation of my work, I would think the os wouldn't need that much power. If it does, then I'm out on the whole Chrome OS concept.

Well since Chrome OS is about the browser ...it doesn't really need any less resources than Chrome (which, like any modern browser, isn't strictly only about "the cloud is doing the storing, management, and manipulation" - a lot happens locally in js, then there are such heavyweight modern improvements(?) as WebGL)

And try running Chrome (or Chromium OS) on a Pentium II 300 MHz ( http://www.raspberrypi.org/faqs"Overall real world performance is something like a 300MHz Pentium 2") with 256 MiB of RAM...